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NEW BRUNSWICK REVIEW.

No. I.

MAY, 1854.

ART. I.-DR. SCHAFF'S WORKS ON CHURCH HISTORY.

1. The Principle of Protestantism as relates to the present state of the Church. By Philip Schaf, Ph. D. Translated from the German; with an Introduction by John W. Nevin, D.D., Chambersburg. Publication office of the German Reformed Church, 1845, pp. 215.

2. What is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development. By Philip Schaf. Translated from the German. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1846, pp. 128.

3. History of the Apostolic Church, with a General Introduction to Church History. By Philip Schaff, Professor in the Theological Seminary at Mercersburg, Pa. Translated by Edward D. Yeomans, New York. Charles Scribner, 145 Nassau st., 1853, pp. 684.

WE cordially welcome whatever tends to stimulate inquiry into the early history of Christianity. It was enjoined of God upon his ancient church, "thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God hath led thee in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, and to know what was in thine heart, that he might do thee good at thy latter end." The recollection and repetition of the great events of their national and church history (which were in fact identical), was through all time to form a large part of domestic instruction and conversation. The reason for this was universal, and the duty must therefore be uniVOL. I.-No. I.

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versal. Is the history of the Christian church at all inferior to that of the Jewish in interest and importance? Is it not every way superior to it; since its field is wider, its truth clearer, its life more free and energetic, its complications more extensive, its events more important, because possessing an interest universal and perpetual as humanity. The history of the church, since the coming of Christ, is the history of the world. From the very close of the apostolic age, the truth and life of Christianity has been the most powerful and influential element in human affairs. It alone gives unity and significance to all history. And to trace the fermentation of this divine leaven as it penetrates the general mass and gradually comes to view in every form of human thought and life, this is the study of church history in its largest sense. If, then, the past vicissitudes and experiences of the church of God, even while its theatre was the narrow strip of Palestine, were to be matter of constant recollection and inculcation, and were divinely declared to be indispensable to preservation from idolatry and the maintenance of pure doctrine, vital piety, and an ever fresh and effectual sense of the providence of God, incomparably more valuable are they to these ends, now that its field is the world. And why should not the Christian, as well as the Hebrew father, teacher, and pastor, derive from church history inexhaustible materials and vital influences in the work of forming the young and the general mind? Yet there is no department of human knowledge so little resorted to, either in the family, school, college, or pulpit, for purposes of Christian culture. Everything in heaven, earth, sea, or atmosphere is analysed, classified, and made tributary to the human soul, in the way of expanding and training its immortal faculties; the stream of worldly history is traced through all its windings; but how seldom is the wakeful intellect and earnest eye of youth directed towards that wonderful series of events, where truth is ever in conflict with error, freedom with tyranny, right with wrong; where all the beneficent energies of the gospel are ever at work, tending gradually, but surely, towards "the time of the restitution of all things;" and where, even “to principalities and powers in heavenly places, is made known through the CHURCH the manifold wisdom of God?"

This general indifference is the result, in part, it must be allowed, of the form in which the history of the church has thus far been written. History, in its highest and best form, is the last product of the human mind in all the departments of its activity. Thucydides did not appear till Greek civilization had reached and passed its culminating point, and Livy and Tacitus enter on their work with lamentations on the departed liberty and greatness of their country. Thus it has been not only in polity, but in literature and art, and it cannot be otherwise with the Christian church, which, in some sense, embraces all these departments. The three first centuries, after the completion of the scriptures, left not a single work which deserves the name of a history. The truly great men of those times. had all their energies tasked in the work of spreading and defending Christianity. Those were the times for preachers and apologists, not for historians. The outward peace and prosperity of the church under Constantine gave birth to the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius; but though learned and industrious, he was credulous to an extreme, and wrote in the manifest interest of that hierarchy to which imperial patronage and state connexion had then brought a great accession of power and dignity. The fourth century abounded in Christian preachers and writers of the highest endowments. But the controversies of the time, with occasional persecutions, fully occupied them, so that of all their works, " voluminous and vast" as they are, little or nothing remains in the proper form of history. In the following age, Jerome and Ruffinus in the Western church, and Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, in the Eastern, left contributions of more or less value to Christian history. But (to say nothing of the fabulous character which the general credulity has imprinted on all the histories of those times) their works are so pervaded and ruled by the monastic and hierarchical spirit, as to be wholly unsuited to popular use. The great body of Christians neither will nor can take any interest in histories which are written for the purpose of magnifying particular orders, and ignore the very existence of by far the most important element in the Christian church, the People. Wherever the Bible is in the hands of the people (and there only exists capacity or interest to read anything), such histories are seen to

be so manifesta falsification of original Christianity, that the popular mind will pass them by with indifference or contempt.

"All the great historical geniuses of Rome," says Tacitus, "disappeared at the establishment of monarchy." And as the Papacy is the most absolute of all monarchies, the nine centuries of its ascendency left not one historian who has attained to anything like general fame. History, during those ages of oppression, was as impossible as photography is in the night time. She never lifts her finger to trace events, nor raises her voice to interpret them, but "in those happy times when men can think what they will, and speak what they think."†

The Reformation was followed by great writers and great works in this as in every other department of mental activity. But they were too controversial to be of general interest or use. The first necessity of the Protestant writers was, of course, to show the historical baselessness of the Papacy. While the Romanists, on the other hand, even those who possessed the highest qualifications, were compelled, in order to make out something like a claim to antiquity, to weave even the latest traditions into their history of the first centuries, and that, too, even while they admitted their utter destitution of historical basis. A multitude of church historians have appeared in still later times, but few have had the patience to explore original sources, and their works have, therefore, had that lifeless character which always sticks to compilations; almost all have kept history continually on the rack, to extort from her a confession to some jus divinum theory of church government; and scarcely any have possessed the indispensable talent of flowing and animated narration. Some of these works have great value for the scholar, but none of them much interest for the people. In fact, the Christian people, the πλῆθος.

ños, "the flock of God," "the multitude of them that believe," who occupy the foreground in the inspired church history of the first half century, the Acts of the Apostles, and maintain their prominence through the period of the

*Postquam . . . omnem potestatem ad unum conferri pacis interfuit, magna illa ingenia cessere.-Hist. I. 1.

Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quæ velis et que sentias dicere licet.-Tac., ib.

truly primitive church, as it was by their labors that the gospel was preached everywhere, and by their blood that the earth was saturated with "the seed of the church," completely vanish from history about the fifth century, and never re-appear till the sixteenth. The hierarchy began the work of encroachment on their rights and liberties, and as soon as Christianity became general enough to be an organ of political power, monarchs lent their whole strength to complete and consolidate this usurpation, so that the two united formed the most perfect and absolute despotism by far that the world has ever beheld. This colossal power threw its shadow over the world for nearly a thousand years. During that period, the people had no voice or representation, either in church or state. Of course, therefore, they make no figure in history. Bishops, patriarchs, popes, and princes, with their mutual struggles and intrigues to get and retain power and riches, together with controversies about rites and dogmas (most of them not even mentioned in the New Testament), make up the whole church history of the middle ages, as if Christ had appeared on earth to found a school of theology, or a rich and lordly hierarchy, and not to make a free and happy world.

Two changes are necessary before ecclesiastical history can become matter of general interest or popular culture and instruction. The whole mass must be subjected to the winnowing process of a just and searching historical criticism. Such a visitation as every department of secular history has undergone within the last half century would vastly diminish the bulk of (so called) ecclesiastical history, and in the same proportion improve its quality. All history has, it is true, been subjected to exaggeration and distortion. But nowhere have ambition and cupidity had so direct and powerful an interest in falsification as in the history of the Christian church. Here, therefore, fables stand in the most fearful disproportion to facts. The abominable doctrine of the Disciplina Arcani (which is simply a device for the invention of traditions to be assigned to any desirable period of the ancient church) has been the mother of an innumerable brood of impostures.

Again, it must be a history of the church, in the original